The astonishingly tenacious Arizona attorney Charles Carreon, apparently not satisfied with his original filing last week, has now amended his case against Matthew Inman et al. to now include California State Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The updated Monday filing is the latest chapter in an increasingly ridiculous legal case involving an online intellectual property dispute. Neither Carreon, Harris, nor any of the other defendants (except for Ars commenter "Modelista") responded immediately to our request for comment. The move to include California’s top law enforcement officer may be a tactic to compel Harris to act on Carreon’s accusations of charitable fundraising fraud as carried out by Inman and IndieGoGo.

A Swedish shield?

In the new filing, Carreon accuses Inman and IndieGoGo of charity fundraising fraud and names Ars Technica commenter “Modelista” as Doe 1 as violating Carreon’s trademark on his own name—Modelista freely admitted that he was behind the creation of a fake account mocking Charles Carreon, which was soon shut down.

“On June 14, 2012, Doe 1, an Internet user who goes by the name ‘Modelista’ on the ArsTechnica.com website, registered the Twitter name ‘@Charles_Carreon,’ and began publishing fake ‘tweets’ on Twitter that were immediately attributed to Plaintiff,” he writes. “This was not only an act of trademark infringement, but also false personation in violation of California Penal Code § 529.”

Photo courtesy Charles Carreon

In an e-mail sent to Ars on Monday, Modelista declined again to provide any identifying information, saying that he was "just an average guy in his 20s going to university somewhere in Sweden."

"I don't see what targeting an anonymous online identity can accomplish," he continued in an encrypted e-mail sent via Hushmail. "Even in the extreme case where the judge approved a court order to obtain my IP address, I would not be threatened at all as I took several measures to hide my true IP address. Also, not living in the United States is another reason I don't really care about the case."

There is an international legal procedure to serve someone in another country, known as the Hague Service Convention, but generally speaking, it's very difficult, if not practically impossible, to collect a judgment abroad.

Carreon seeks subpoenas, damages

Carreon previously told Ars that he planned to subpoena Ars Technica and Twitter to reveal the identities of Does 1-100.

In the third claim for relief, Carreon accuses Does 2-100 of “cybervandalism,” by “cracking the password on Carreon’s own website and signing him up for pornographic websites. As numerous law blogs have pointed out, there is no such law prohibiting “cybervandalism.”

“Plaintiff has received very large numbers of hate emails, some wishing him death by cancer, and many more forecasting the complete destruction of his professional life. Plaintiff has received voice mails from Dominos pizza wanting to confirm his ordering of pizzas that he in fact did not order,” Carreon writes in the new filing. “Plaintiff never experienced any such invasions of his privacy and quiet enjoyment before the Bear Love campaign.”

The new filing also reiterates Carreon's demand for a judicial order requiring that the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society (Inman's two target charities) get 50 percent of the money raised on the IndieGoGo website. (Carreon himself presumably would take the other half.) He is also seeking damages against Modelista and Inman, and wants a court order barring charities and IndieGoGo from raising money without registering the campaign with the California Attorney General's office.

Update: Carreon wrote to Ars in an e-mail on Monday afternoon: "I'm killing my Twitter account, so anyone who tweets under my name is an impostor."

Listing image by Photo courtesy Charles Carreon

Promoted Comments

Is Carreon licensed in California? All of the articles say he's based in Arizona.

Yup, CA admission here. Also includes information about how he was suspended for a time for practicing law in Canada without the proper license there. Plus, it has his email address listed. The one he claims in his complaint that was never used outside of legal briefs or web registrations, and thus, claims was given out by Inman in an effort to harass him. Yeah, for an internet law attorney, this guy is pretty clueless as to how much of his information is freely available to anyone that has spent any time on Google.

Thank you, Ars Technica, for calling this mess exactly what it is: "increasingly ridiculous". An unfortunate offshoot of Inman's attorneys advising him not to speak to the press is that now Carreon is the only one talking, and several reporters who have not done their homework are publishing incorrect facts and lending credence to this preposterous suit.

Not only is Carreon taking advantage of Inman's media silence, but he is having his wife threaten people that they will become named Does if they continue to be critical of him. She actually posted my picture, referring to me as "one of the little lying bitches working for Matt Inman" and going on to insinuate that they may have evidence I am linked to the parody accounts set up and "'Ann' is definitely going to get sued. She can count on it. But she won't be named as a DOES, rather as a named defendant."

Charles Carreon should be disbarred before he and his family can try and intimidate anyone else into not exercising their first amendment rights. He and she have a free attorney who evidently has nothing better to do than devote 24 hours a day to trying to censor people. Those of us being targeted by them do not have that luxury.